Salt Lake Tribune | 1918-03-11 | Page 5 | Goshen Eulogizes Great Agnostic

GOSHEN EULOGIZES " GlEfflJiOSl Characterizing Robert G. IngrersoU as a man of great brain ajid pure heart, who, in his career as a tearer-down, had shamed the church out of many doctrines and dog-ma 3 it formerly accepted and preached, the Rev. Elmer I. Goshen of the First Congregational church, pave a lecture lec-ture yesterday morning upon the life ajid work of the great agnostic to a capacity audience, several hundred persons being unable to even find standing room. Dr. Goshen said while Ingersoll at times seemed cruel in his work of destroying de-stroying tradition and superstition, the tearing down process was necessary before be-fore the beautiful permanent structure could be undertaken. ?le pointed out that Ingersoll had been, as a boy, reared in an atmosphere of orthodoxy wherein God was pictured as a monster who would punish with everlasting torment the majority ma-jority of the souls he had created because be-cause they did not believe as they were told. He declared the great orator's attacks On the church had borne good fruit in that few indeed were the church members mem-bers of today who could or would accept the creeds preached in the pulpits of thirty or forty years ago and maintained that the individual responsibility of man for his own acts was far more generally accepted because of the fearless and clear-cut attacks which Ingersoll had made upon the doctrine of an eternal hell. . As illustrative of Tngersoll's breadth of view and his love for humanity, the pastor pas-tor quoted his prose poem depicting emotions emo-tions aroused at the tomb of Napoleon, wherein the orator declares that he would have rather been a French peasant, with his wife by his side and his children on his knees than the Napoleon who left a trail of blood and desolation in his wake. Dr; Goshen said the great agnostic had always cherished the eternal hope that is in the soul of man, closing with a quotation quota-tion from Ingersoll's address at the grave of his brother: "But in the night of Death, Hope sees a star, and listening Love can always hear the rustle of a wing."